Last week, it was reported that Black Flag's Greg Ginn was suing the members of FLAG (Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, Dez Cadena, Bill Stevenson, Stephen Egerton) and Henry Rollins. Now, Ginn has clarified the lawsuit in an official statement (via Exclaim).

He explains that he's not trying to stop FLAG from touring and playing old Black Flag songs. Instead, he's focusing on them selling "bootleg items" and Morris and Rollins' attempt to file for the Black Flag trademark, which was already owned by Ginn and SST Records. He writes:

The dispute over Black Flag is not motivated by an effort to stop anyone from covering Black Flag songs. Quite to the contrary. This dispute began when Henry Garfield (Rollins) and Keith Morris made an effort to hijack the name — and the logo — for their own use. Behind everyone's back, in September 2012, Garfield and Morris filed fraudulent trademark applications in which they are claiming to own the name and the logo. Had we not taken action, this pair could have snuck these false applications through the Trademark Office, enabling them to stop Black Flag from playing and gaining exclusive use of the name and logo for themselves. We are also trying to stop Morris and the others in his band from using the name and the logo in a misleading way, and from selling bootleg items.

"They forced us to do this, because not only do we need to bring an opposition to the trademark application in the trademark office, but we also need to bring what's called a cancellation action for cancellation of the existing mark — for the four bars. Then we also found out that they're also selling bootleg T-shirts on the tour and then they started — about halfway through the tour — they started using the actual bars, not the even bars, but the uneven bars. It's like they ratcheted up their usage of the Black Flag materials and it came to a point where we couldn't not sue them."

The Phoenix New Times talked to FLAG (and OFF!) frontman Keith Morris about the lawsuit. He said he'd just been served the papers, which he described as being the size of "two and a half movie scripts". He said:

We've done nothing wrong. Every step of the way, we've all talked to each other--"we're going to do this," or "we're not going to do that"-- we know what he is capable of doing and we're not scared, we're not shaking in our shoes, we're not going to be bullied. We'll just proceed forward. We live our lives, and whatever the outcome is, we're good guys, we've done nothing wrong, so we don't really have to worry about anything.

Here's footage from the first FLAG show, plus Black Flag's "Down in the Dirt":